Website Design

WEBSITE DESIGN

PART 2

TO SHOP OR NOT TO SHOP

You can always tell the people who know little or nothing about designing webpages. They're the most ardent supporters of Photoshop. "Baaaa, Baaaa, we must use Photoshaaaap," they proclaim. (Those are supposed to be sheep bleats, for the slower members of the audience.) But unless you're looking to make fake nudes of your favorite actress, or make it look like a woman is having sex with a horse (and don't, for even a moment, think I'm making that one up), you probably don't need Photoshop at all. For creating web graphics, and enhancing, cropping, and resizing photographs, there are many other software packages on the market which perform the task perfectly and cost a small fraction of the price of Photoshop. But don't tell anyone - it's a big secret.

FLASHERS

An effective implementation of FLASH on the internet is a lot like extraterrestrial life: you imagine just from the sheer numbers involved that it probably must exist somewhere, but there are no credible reports of anyone ever witnessing it. And you know damn sure you've never seen it yourself. For all you novice webdesigners out there who modestly refer to your homepages as "wastes of webspace", you have nothing to be ashamed of as long as there are official movie sites. Those are the true wastes of webspace, and a whole lot of it. I wasn't crazy about The Green Mile, but I've got to admit its website was well-designed - clean and to the point. Their site was the exception. On the other end of the scale are such sites as the one for Scream 3, which was apparently designed to take up hours of your time without providing a single useful tidbit of information. Fortunately, the Brazilian Scream 3 site was better, evidently having been designed by someone with an IQ above 70.

I was poking around Moviefone the other day when suddenly, without warning, a window opens and starts playing a FLASH ad for U-571. I almost sprained my wrist in a mad dash to slam the window shut, but not before witnessing a still picture of a submarine slowly being dragged across the screen, followed by a still picture of a depth charge slowly descending from above. Give me a break. The animation was only slightly poorer than you'd get from an eight-year-old playing with a super-8 camera. This is progress? Basically, what the FLASH perpetrator is saying is,"For the next several minutes, I'm going to vomit on the screen, and make you watch." Frankly, sir, I would prefer not to.

So if you're going to insist on using FLASH, and ruining any hope whatsoever of having a website that's anything other than completely useless, please, please, please, please, put the "No Flash" or "Skip Intro" buttons in LARGE LETTERS.

HIT COUNTERS

Yes, they look unprofessional, and yes, this site has one. I originally installed it before I had the access statistics package on the web server up and running. Netscape does provide an option to have the counter be invisible, which I first tried, but you don't get the full statistics that way. The one advantage the counter has over the server statistics is that the counter's are broken down by day, whereas the server's information is cumulative for the month. That and the fact it's kind of neat to pop in at the end of the day and get a quick summary of the day's traffic at a glance, are the reasons it's still there. The problem is that it's no longer accurate, since it only records hits to the homepage. Some users have bookmarked the movie reviews page and bypass the homepage altogether, and now that Lycos, alltheweb, and a few other search engines have begun indexing the individual movie review pages, visitors are arriving directly at those pages and never clicking up to the homepage. The bottom line is that for every hit registering on the counter, the server statistics are showing about 3 visitors to the site. These are still paltry numbers by any standard, but I'm actually not displeased with them. I'm starting to see a lot of repeat visitors, which to me is the most important statistic.

Speaking of hit counters, don't always believe the numbers you see displayed. Most counters (Netscape's included) have the option of starting them at any old number your little heart desires. Some that are integral to the HTML coding on the page will reveal their "secret" reset number if you just use your browser to view the source code. All of which means Aunt Ethel, whose homepage shows 800 hits after being up for only two days, may not be as popular as you first thought. And yes, I did start my counter at zero, meaning the guy who was hit number 1 probably has a screen print of it hanging on his refrigerator. Come to think of it, I guess I was hit number 1, meaning that that historical event has been forever lost to posterity.